


Mnemosyne

by preussisch_blau



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Dark, Gen, I'm really not sure how to tag this, Psychological Trauma, Psychological and Neurological Analysis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-02
Updated: 2016-03-02
Packaged: 2018-05-24 10:07:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6150119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/preussisch_blau/pseuds/preussisch_blau
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All memories are, all personality is, are mappings of neurons that, when fired in a specific sequence, create certain effects and actions. And Harrison is slowly coming to the realisation that the reason he's still alive, in any sense of the word, is because of that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mnemosyne

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jujubiest](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jujubiest/gifts).



> The question was asked of [Lethe](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5597470): "Do Eobard and Harrison merge or is Harrison more of a ghost in the machine?" (Well, okay, paraphrasing, but that was the gist of the question.)
> 
> This attempts to answer that question.
> 
> beta read by dancesontrains

All he can feel is excruciating _pain._

His last jumbled memories are of the car skidding out, a horrible crash, Tess possibly dying next to him, and a man dragging him from the wreckage. A man who had no intentions of saving him. A man who connected something to his chest that felt like acid burning in his veins and bubbling up to erupt from his skin. It hurts hurts _hurts_ like nothing he has ever felt before in his life. Like his insides are melting, like his bones have been replaced by white-hot steel, like a thousand million cuts shred his skin.

The pain is so intense that he cannot even really scream.

Whatever that device does, he dimly knows it's killing him. He wishes it would do so faster, if only to end this agony.

When he blacks out, it's a mercy.

* * *

He wakes to the screaming sensation of _wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong_ , and the pain is unrelenting daggers in his head, chest, limbs. Beyond that, though, his awareness is limited. He can't see, can't move, but he can hear, and what he does hear tells a story that - combined with the limitless agony flooding his body - tells him his last memories of the night before aren't some terrible nightmare.

Harrison shouts himself hoarse, trying to find out where Tess is, but it seems like nothing is getting through, and he feels more and more terrified. And then, suddenly, he hears his own voice, trembling, weaker than it should be for how loud he's yelling.

There's a sudden pressure in his head, pounding, merciless, that reminds him he knows _exactly_ what happened without ever actually speaking to him.

It distracts him enough that he doesn't catch the words of the response he gets, only that it's a woman speaking, and he can't _see her-_

His blood runs cold when he recognises his voice again, but he's not even trying to speak. He's talking about the accident, but the memories flashing up in his mind's eye tell it from a different perspective. One of a car coming down the road. "I was driving…" A spike strip, carefully laid out where it would not be seen in time for the driver of the car to avoid it. "There was… something…" Grim satisfaction at seeing the tires blow out, the car flip over, and -

"Where's Tess?" he manages to get out, past that haze of pain and fear, despite his inability to otherwise move or even _see_.

His headache only worsens, like someone slamming a booted foot down hard onto his skull and pressing. The pain comes with the stern, annoyed reminder that Tess is dead, and he _knows that voice._ Harrison knows that voice because it was the last voice he heard before waking up in this prison that he is slowly beginning to understand is his own body.

 _You killed her,_ is the thought that fills his entire being.

That strange man tried to kill him outright and let her die; except somehow he's still here, and she isn't. He's still here, trapped in his own mind and subject to the whims of some sort of psychopath and it's enough to make tears well up in his eyes and drip wetly down his face.

Unconsciousness beckons, and he slips into that welcoming oblivion.

* * *

His life, if you want to call it that, is a haze of fragmented conversations and disjointed stimulus. Moments of seeing the world around him, sometimes being able to speak - it's painful, almost worse than when he nearly died, the night he says to Tina that it's _his_ fault, _he's_ the one who killed Tess, through a veil of tears and choked voice. It doesn't feel right when he says it, although there's a part of Harrison that believes if he had paid more attention, hadn't let himself be distracted, then maybe, _maybe_ he would have seen the spike strip in the road.

But as quickly as those moments come, those moments when he's in control, they're gone. Gone with the vise-like pressure in his head, gone with the echo of the agony from his last minutes fully in control of his own body. Usually he can at least perceive what's going on around him, how the conversations that he's started play out when that _other_ man reaffirms his power. Eobard Thawne, Harrison eventually learns is his name. In another life, perhaps he might have sympathised over having ridiculous names. In another life, maybe he could have been amused by the idiosyncracies of this man. (He thinks mayonaisse tastes like _despair,_ which is so over-the-top melodramatic that even in this tortured half-life he exists in now, Harrison can't help but laugh.)

Sometimes, he whispers out towards the weight of Eobard's mind that _I would have helped you. You didn't have to kill me. You didn't have to kill Tess._

And even knowing that Thawne came here to kill someone, he... still thinks that he might have helped him anyways. If it meant Tess didn't die. Besides, his new goal is to build the particle accelerator that Tess and Harrison had dreamed up, and Harrison is entirely game for that. Though he doesn't like that Thawne wants it to _fail._ Still, the science of it is enough to distract Harrison from how utterly hopeless his situation is. How he can't even control his own body. He mulls the plans over whilst Thawne does heavens knows what with his life, at least at first.

Then one day he notices that he's very aware of his surroundings. Harrison might not be the one running the show, but he's no longer surrounded by nothingness, no longer hearing the world in muffled tones with sudden sharp clarity. He can see the bright sunlight streaming through the window as they wake up. Hears the sound of the coffee pot starting its cycle, soft not because of dissociation, but because it's in the kitchen and he's laying in bed on blissfully soft sheets. He could roll over and go back to sleep, but no matter how aware he finally is of the world around him, he's still not in charge. His body moves at Thawne's command, and he pushes out of bed to go to the bathroom.

Harrison doesn't even care, though, because it's the first time in what feels like a lifetime that he's felt anything other than varying degrees of pain. He basks in the warmth of the shower, savours the bitterness of the coffee and the striking contrast of plain boiled eggs, revels in the slight scratch of a new shirt still stiff with the starch pressed into it at the factory. It feels almost like a betrayal of Tess, to be this content being the passenger in the consciousness of the man who killed her, but it's so _new_ after all that time alone in the dark, with his thoughts and the overpowering weight of Thawne's personality his only stimulus or company, that... He can't quite help himself.

He is in his office at S.T.A.R. Labs when he feels the pressure behind his eyes ease, the lingering ache in his bones fade in bare amounts. A slight smile works across Eobard’s face as he turns his attention back to the work in front of him. Blueprints, notes on his particle accelerator, primarily on the cooling system. For his purposes, this is the best point for it to fail to cause an explosion catastrophic enough to create a storm of dark matter and as-yet-unnamed particles.

Harrison taps the tip of his pen thoughtfully on his scratch paper, before making a note about how there is a flaw in the cooling system for the electromagnets that would cause a failure in the path of the particle at an early stage of the experiment, possibly before the second particle could be injected for the collision. His headache begins to return with a vengeance, but he can’t help but notice an odd sort of distant satisfaction at his observation.

* * *

It's when he gains control for longer than a few seconds, in a conversation about the particle accelerator and the construction of it, that Harrison becomes horrified. Because he should have no idea who he's talking to, or what it is they are really talking _about,_ not without pushing himself towards Eobard's consciousness. He's never really taken part in any of the conversations that have come up over the years about building S.T.A.R. Labs.

Harrison flees back to the safety of his empty existence, blocking out any and all of what's going on around him. He can _feel_ confusion, momentary though it is, pressing, pushing, choking him from all sides. Emotions that aren't his own. And that's better than what he just experienced. Better by far. Because there's no reason he should have been able to converse so easily about something he has no conscious recollection of. No reason, looking back, that he should have been so capable of making notes about the particle accelerator, the other projects Thawne has been using his name to work on.

Except there is.

After all, all memories are, all personality is, are mappings of neurons that, when fired in a specific sequence, create certain effects and actions. And Harrison is slowly coming to the realisation that the reason he's still alive, in any sense of the word, is because of that. Because no matter how Thawne used that device to painfully take control of his body, the neuron connections that made up 'Harrison Wells' until that point still continued to exist. And so, he persisted as well.

The fact that he had become an observer to the life of Eobard Thawne, whilst Thawne was the one in charge? Well, that could have made a compelling argument for the existence of the soul. Some metaphysical force that directed consciousness, moreso than the brain itself. More likely, it was that the neuron maps for Thawne's memories and personality were somehow laid out in his - their - brain as well.

That horrifying hypothesis is the one Harrison is leaning towards, as the icy realisation dawns that he could remember events he never observed because he could access the right neural pathways. It was the only way to explain it, because if Thawne's personality were a purely external energy, he saw no way that he should have access to any of it, beyond what had occurred since they became joined (for lack of a better term).

Considering all of the things he set his mind to as distraction from the ache and loneliness of his situation only furthers Harrison's panic. Again, all things he never should have known on his own. How Thawne hates mayonnaise. Why Thawne is in this time. The fact that Eobard Thawne is _from the future._ (Not that the latter couldn't have been inferred from the one conversation he had with the man before they ended up in the same body, but he was a _little_ preoccupied to really consider the implications of Thawne's words.)

The fact - one he's ignored and ignored but is now having to confront painfully as he sorts through another man's life in a desperate gambit to find something he can't access as easily as his own memories, some disproof to his growing theory - that Harrison Wells _died_ as a result of a device that overwrote Thawne's body with his own.

He died.

And every memory since then isn't really his own. He's just a ghost in the machine, so to speak. The stubborn biological remnants of a man who died years ago and was buried in an unmarked grave off the side of a lonely road.

Harrison curls in on himself in despair, cursing the inventor of that device for not letting him properly _die._

* * *

Eobard waits until they are alone in the Cortex, just Barry and him and the faint beep and hum of the hospital equipment in the room, before he directs the speed force down his spine, lightning bridging the gap he cannot allow to heal just yet. He stands, crosses the short distance to the bed where Barry lays, unconscious, unresponsive.

He could kill him right now, he muses. It would be so easy, a simple matter of phasing his hand through the boy's chest and crushing his heart. There'd be no fight. If he wanted to be extremely cautious about it, there were a number of drugs in this very room that, in the right dose, at this point in time, would stop Allen's heart. No one would question a coma patient dying, not after how long it had been. The chances of Barry waking up should have been slim by this point, but he knew better.

Harrison withdraws his hand. No, he can't do it now. After all, this boy is his key to returning home. For all his plots, all his plans, the desire to kill the Flash… Eobard had to be the one to create him, in the end. True, he didn't really need Barry alive to have a proper connection to the speed force once more - it seems that once the initial conduit to it for their world got his powers, then not even death can turn the speed force away. He knew that much even before his disastrous attempt on a young Barry's life; what he hadn't expected was that trying to prevent _that_ connection would interfere with all subsequent connections, including his own.

No, no, the issue is that to guarantee he returns to _his_ time and not just the _right year,_ he has to undo what he did. And genius though he may be, _fast_ though he may be, even Eobard does not have the capability to be simultaneously travelling fifteen years into the past and over a century into the future. There really are limits to how many places the exact same person can be at once.

He adjusts the equipment around Allen's bed, checks to make sure the IVs are flowing properly, that the oxygen pressure is exactly right. Barry Allen will die, yes, but it will be at Eobard's hand, at the exact moment that he requires it. Then, only then, and not any sooner simply because Harrison was careless with him whilst he was in this vulnerable state.

* * *

He’d tried. Oh how he had tried. For so long it had been easier, simpler to just accept the fact that he was fading into Eobard’s conscious. Even when the man had considered murdering a comatose Barry Allen. But Eobard stayed his hand, and Harrison felt more awake than he had in years, watching these children try to save the city from his - well, Thawne’s, really - evil.

And he’d watched Thawne grow to like his new team despite himself. Eobard wondered if it was some lingering influence from the neurology of Harrison Wells. Maybe, maybe.

And maybe it was purely Harrison who wanted to stay here, in this time, in this timeline, though he’d argue that the parts of him that were Eobard also wanted to stay, because his memories of the home he left behind were already so faded, like an old, worn photograph left in the sun too long. Because they had argued over their last burger, about staying, about whether they could atone for their crimes. Eobard wasn’t as optimistic as Harrison, though, too eager to cling to the familiar hate that his subconscious just didn’t share, and it had been that conscious desire that carried the day.

Harrison stares at the wormhole now, watching, waiting. As soon as Barry returns, they leave. The lie about the wormhole not destabilising into a singularity weighs heavy on his mind - time abhors a paradox, and without the necessary event of Barry’s mother dying to create this timeline, it will fall apart. But it’s a necessary evil, one that must happen to undo all the others, and Harrison can’t help but be pleased by the thought of the timeline where Tess doesn’t die until she’s old and grey, where he never ends up murdered and trapped as a neurological remnant in the mind of a sociopath, prevailing.

Barry returns, not in a run slowing to a stop but in a supersonic punch. The glass of the time machine shatters around him, and so too does any lingering good will Harrison might have. Gone, subsumed by the surge of anger that rushes up as he realises exactly what Barry must have decided in the past.

He was supposed to fix this! He was supposed to fix _everything!_ Harrison can't tell what part of him is more enraged by this. Himself, Eobard, it doesn't really matter because the fury just feeds off itself, building quickly, blurring everything else in its wake.

He was going to go _home._ He wasn't going to _die._ He was going to get his original body back. He was never going to have his life stolen. He was going to be with his family once more, people he knew and cared about and didn't have to lie to. He was going to be free of this horrible chimeric brain structure. Barry could have had his mother back and Tess never would have had to die and all the people dead because of his particle accelerator wouldn’t be.

Except Barry didn’t save her.

Didn’t save any of them.

Didn’t save _him._

Eobard vibrates his hand, raises it up to plunge it into Barry's heart, and Harrison is too numb with shock-anger- _grief_ to really try to stop him.


End file.
